Time Travel

Where would you go if you could travel back in time? Would you visit King Arthur’s Camelot? Would you return to a pivotal moment in world history? Would you perhaps walk the decks of the Titanic? If I had the ability to time travel, I would like to visit with my parents when they were young. We always think of our parents as old people, no matter what their age, since they will always be twenty or thirty (or in my parents’ case, forty) years older than us. But what were they like as young adults? What were their dreams, their hopes, their passions? Wouldn’t it be fun to spend a little time with them then, and really get to know them. My Mum and Dad are gone. A handful of anecdotes of their younger years are all that I have from that period: Dad getting a bit tipsy and calling a square dance, Dad kicking the round globe from a streetlamp around like a football, Mum’s sudden realization, when she fell off her bike, that she loved Dad (?). Yes, they were young once, too! But, just like us, their lives didn’t go exactly as planned. Idealistic dreams were never realized and hopes were dashed, as they coped with war, with absent loved ones, with air raids, with rationing, struggling to look after their families in the direst of circumstances. But they carried on. After the war, many of them uprooted themselves and left behind family and friends to emigrate to Canada in hopes of securing a brighter future for their children. If we could spend some time with them, share their experiences, witness their trials and tribulations, maybe we could better understand what made them the people we knew. We could better appreciate their strengths and forgive their shortcomings, and love them even more for the sacrifices they made for us.